Website builder Wix acquires art community DeviantArt, which has 40M+ registered members, for $36M in cash, including $3M of assumed liabilities
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2017, Wix paid just $36M in cash — including $3M of assumed liabilities — for DeviantArt's 40M+ registered members, an unusually cheap way to bolt a large creative community onto a website builder whose earlier growth play was organic education via WixEd, its free online design school.
Read against the rest of the coverage, the deal looks like the opening move in an acquisition-led capability build-out: Wix went on to ship an AI Site Generator that builds sites from chat prompts, add an AI-powered mobile app builder to its Branded App plan, and pay $80M for the six-person prompt-to-app startup Base44 — while later cutting roughly 20% of its workforce, citing the fast evolution of AI capabilities.
First-order effects
- DeviantArt stops operating independently: its 40M+ member community and brand now sit inside a Tel Aviv-based commercial web hosting company, giving Wix a built-in audience of creatives for its builder products.
- Wix acquires the community at a price (~$36M) that is small relative to its later AI purchases, making this a low-cost bet on owning creator audiences rather than renting them through ads or partnerships.
Second-order effects
- Rival web design platforms face the same build-vs-buy math: Webflow's later acquisition of Intellimize, an AI website personalization firm that had raised $50M+, shows competitors also choosing acquisition over internal development for AI-era capabilities.
- Owning a large user-generated-content community positions Wix's own AI tooling — the Site Generator and app builders — with a native base of creators whose work and workflows feed the platform's templates and components.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, website builders consolidate into AI-generation platforms where communities, templates, and prompt-based creation are stacked assets — a shift disruptive enough that Wix and Shutterstock shares fell at least 30% in 2025 on investor concerns about AI upending the category, and Wix cut about 20% of staff citing AI's pace of change.
- The DeviantArt-to-Base44 arc suggests small creative communities are valued less as standalone businesses than as inputs to platform AI strategies, compressing exit prices for independent community sites.
The trend: Website builders are absorbing creative communities first and AI generation tools next, turning serial acquisition — not organic feature-building — into the core engine of platform capability.